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An Inconvenient Truth

Optimism was built to empower humanity through decentralized blockchain technology that enables unprecedented coordination of human intelligence across the globe, at scale. And there is a lot to celebrate: by our estimation, over the past two years, OP Mainnet has cumulatively saved users $2.69 billion in fees, 15.8 years of waiting for transaction confirmations, and currently secures $2.8 billion in onchain value.

But the reality is: nobody has truly scaled Ethereum. That includes us.

If Ethereum is to rival the goliaths of web2, and take software’s next bite of the world, it needs internet-level scale. No single chain today can offer that.

At the same time, a multichain world brings its own challenges. Ethereum L2s are already pushing the limits of tooling and UX, and we are nowhere near global scale. To support the next hundreds, thousands, and millions of chains, we need a paradigm shift.

The reality is–as growing brands and ecosystems look for platforms to call home, they have limited, imperfect options. Large ecosystems like Coinbase are faced with a difficult decision: they can deploy on Ethereum and forfeit scalability, choose a single L2 and be dependent on that ecosystem, or deploy and maintain their own chain and fragment liquidity and network effects.

An Optimistic Future

What if we could have both the scalability of parallel chains and the composability of a single blockchain? What if all those chains shared an open source stack that prioritized decentralization, governance, security, and making constant improvements in tandem?

It’s time for Optimism to prepare for the next wave of adoption.

It’s time to build a unified network of chains, not just one.

It’s time to build together, not apart.

It’s time for Optimism to become a platform for chains.

Optimism has always been an open source project, and proudly has the most forks of any L2. But now, it’s time to double down. This isn’t just about creating many chains–it’s about uniting them into a single network.

We call the result the Superchain.

The Superchain seeks to integrate otherwise siloed L2s into a single interoperable and composable system. We need to work towards a future where launching an L2 is as straightforward as deploying a smart contract to Ethereum is today.

Lastly–and perhaps most importantly–when we build together, we win together. This is why sustaining the OP Stack codebase as a public good is critical. Speaking of…

A Based Announcement

Today, we welcome a new entrant to the Optimism ecosystem: Coinbase.

Coinbase joins as both a core developer of the OP Stack codebase, and as a new L2 blockchain built on it, called Base.

As core developers, Coinbase will join OP Labs in contributing to the mission of the Optimism Collective, extending the OP Stack’s lead as the most OverPowered public good in the game.

As a chain, Base will commit a portion of transaction fee revenue back to an Optimism Collective treasury, furthering the vision for a sustainable future where Impact = Profit.

In the near term, this collaboration strives to upgrade OP Mainnet, Base, and other L2s to an initial Superchain structure, with shared bridging and sequencing.

In the long term, the Superchain can blossom into a sprawling network which maximizes interoperability, shares decentralized protocols, and standardizes its core primitives–all while funding the public goods which enable it.

We will scale together.

If you’d like to join us, get in touch, or start contributing.

And, as always,

Stay Optimistic! 🔴✨